"Yes."

"Irret, what did you get from my conversation with Griffith?"

"Not much? Focusing is hard while I'm healing and I just did a lot and you didn't ask me to this time."

That actually makes a lot of sense. If he was so brain-damaged that he couldn't understand the kinds of basic theory he just tried to explain, he'd probably have focus trouble too.

"Why do you think the Upper Planes's culture can't adequately handle infohazards?"

Griffie indicates a door. "Irret, that should be keyed to you. Please go."

Irret goes.

Griffie turns to Keltham. "There is a hostile and powerful infohazard-using species which specifically has the ability to cause societies to develop incorrect beliefs about them."

"How does that work?"

"I don't know! It's very hard to study something that can make sure your funding for it gets lost! It only gets studied by independent researchers who can't get a significant budget and are prone to going mad from isolation!"

"And I suppose there's a reason negotiations have failed, too."

"The relevant species – they're called Jabberwocks – are mostly into death and destruction. They particularly hate people who try to bargain with them or pray to them, but I don't know why and don't expect to find out anytime soon."

"Why would someone hate being bargained with? Even Evil people tend to like that, they can get more torture victims and such that way! They might not like honest bargaining, but that doesn't mean they'd object to someone being honest with them."

"Well, you can't exactly pay them to answer surveys about their preferences, can you?"

"I… suppose… you… gah! Why are people like this‽"

"There are a lot of ways for people to be and we're in a tiny bubble where we can at least sort of mentally model people most of the time?"

"That doesn't… there are theorems about how aliens with wildly divergent preferences and cognitive styles should converge on acting in various domains. This doesn't actually really mesh well with those. You could model a utility function where the behavior fulfills it, but it's really arbitrary and makes little evolutionary sense."

"Maybe they were created, or they're more quintessence-powered than they look? We don't have good records on the First World and we don't have good records on Jabberwocks and these two combine poorly. Or maybe there is a great explanation of all things Jabberwock and I just haven't seen it even though it's been in plain view of me every time I visit the relevant library section!"

"Are there known hazards here that flip people's utility function? Strange distant things in space, maybe cursed items?"

"For the former, not that I know of but going deep into outer space is illegal. For the latter … I think I would have heard about it if those existed. And possibly seen one in action. Demon's Bile drives you mad in an evil way but I really wouldn't describe it like that, devils with infohazards wield them strategically, I've seen a daemonic ritual intended to delete components of someone's motivation but not flip them. It's plausibly the case that proteans have ever done that to themselves, but, well, proteans."

"Do you think telling me about proteans is relevant to either of our goals?"

"Doesn't seem like an obvious priority to go into too much detail? Relevantly, they tend to like breaking rules and heuristics, including occasionally the heuristic that they won't turn themselves into pure rule-enforcers."

"How is it that proteans continue to exist?"

"The answer in a lot of cases is 'they don't'. Sure, every protean you get the chance to meet will have some self-preservation, but this is not actually representative. However, if you do read case studies or meet a protean, you will probably still wonder why they are alive, and the answer to that is that much of the power of a protean goes into forcing the universe to ignore consequences."

"So, 'forcing the universe to ignore consequences' seems wildly underspecified."